


8. geocaching

by Phritzie



Series: Pale Blue Dots [2]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Ableism, Abuse of OTC Medication, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gun Violence, I Know the Rituals Are Intricate, Muscle Kink, On the Run, Other, Otter's Ship Prompt Generator, Police Violence, Runescape + Kinktober 2020, There Is Lingerie Eventually, Transmasc Character(s), Yearning of All Kinds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:00:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26831056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phritzie/pseuds/Phritzie
Summary: Your prompt:Azzanadra and Sliske both buy lingerie and try to surprise one another with it on the same night.This is not exactly that story, but it came pretty close.
Relationships: Azzanadra/Sliske (Runescape)
Series: Pale Blue Dots [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1941913
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you would like an opportunity to skip the police violence, firstly you're valid, and secondly there are two options. One is to skip to the first linebreak. The other - if you'd just prefer the porn and none of the ridiculous plot set-up - is to skip directly to Chapter 2. :)
> 
> Either way, thank you so much for stopping by. Also, I did have to poll a couple folks in order to name Tuna - please direct any and all praise for their nom de plume to Tribs, Cici and the Tomes.
> 
> [This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.]

Sliske had never been to an American jail before.

Television had ruined him for American prison. But American jail — specifically, this rustic Mariposa county jail allegedly in want of running water — was a greater disappointment.

He’d expected it to be different. Sliske wasn’t sure how in particular. Just that it fell short of many long-held misconceptions he’d picked up, in the time between his arrest and the year Gutenberg stopped thinking, _“maybe if I banged hundreds of pieces of wood together_ ,” and actually got on with it.

He supposed he’d imagined more carousing. It was boring, lonely, and quiet—Oh, and there was one thing. No harmonicas! He would’ve enjoyed that. 

The whole aesthetic was wrong. No windowed bars to dramatically pry apart. No bunks. No beds. _Zero_ chairs. And his contact had taken such a long time to process. So he’d have appreciated the courtesy of a chair, at least. 

“Ow!” they shouted, whipping around to snap their teeth at the bleeding face of the officer — _C. McKinley_ , _badge number 3007_ — attempting to squeeze them into the holding cell. Thin red wept from a slit in the darkening bruise over his eye, which meant they’d had cause to hit him hard, and recently. 

That _really_ didn’t sit right. As Sliske was feeling romantic, and perhaps even dreadfully local, immersed in so much culture, he decided to borrow an American arbitration system to keep track of further violations. Strike one.

“Shut up!” the officer shouted back. The door barely closed before they slammed its surface with both palms. “Just shut up!”

“Eat fucking shit!” they screamed louder.

To his credit, the officer only flinched a little. “I could come in there!” 

Entering should’ve been the last thing he chose to do; ignoble attitude aside, his number of opponents had doubled. Maybe the threat had served him well in the past. It was still in poor taste. Strike two.

“If you do,” Sliske drawled, peeling free from where he’d been resting cross-legged and nude on the floor like a yogi. “Be aware that I will make your injury symmetrical.” 

His contact gave the door a solid kick and turned, huffing uncharitable things. Tuna Glitter shook themself of whatever kingslaying mien had carried them mostly unharmed through being booked and looked him over squarely.

Though they'd never met, Glitter’s brief had described them as notoriously method. Sliske was going to ease them into their pass-off anyway, being a creature of habit and caution, but his new cellmate kissed him before he could even handle them out of view. 

This circumvented the entire seduction phase of the operation and, in his opinion, rendered the coded handshake pointless. Adjusting course to a heading several steps later, he went right into patting Glitter down, beginning at their clavicles and sparing no detail about the region of their breasts. It seemed fair. At least they had clothes on.

“Hey! Stop that!”

Unfortunately, their audience hadn’t quite flustered enough to mind his own business, instead choosing to watch and stoke the sort of restless anger that meant they would need to hurry if Sliske didn't want to leave bodies.

He was already extracting his hand from the interior pocket of a very tight pair of Wranglers when Glitter cleared their throat obviously. Tapping a claw against the banknotes he’d slipped there, Sliske pulled his lips away and blinked. “Alright?”

Something struck the cell. “I said stop!”

“No.” Scowling, they made a pointed move at their left shoe, which seemed to be in such dire straits Sliske judged it a short walk from exploding apart like a dandelion puff. “I have bigot on my knuckles.”

“Jesu—” _Right_. That. “You—out of there, now!”

“Sorry, darling.” He turned to position himself between them and any potential commotion. “I’ll take care of it.”

The officer reared for their holster. “Step _back_ , you deaf alien fre—”

Strike three.

_You’re out._

“Why don’t any of these cockroaches seem to drink,” Sliske said, a while after the braying had ended and he’d gained nothing from a spot of karmic ransacking but an improvised skirt. 

His contact prodded the twisted, motionless thing he’d thrown slapdash through the pane of an interrogation window before hobbling after him into the sheriff’s office.

“It’s Lent.” Glitter offered him their broken shoe. “If you see him, please remind Dr Nabanik I’m not doing this again.”

He tried to shake it out, but it was empty. Sliske yanked up the tongue and shook it a little harder. Glitter snorted. In one deft motion, they ripped a dirty strip of duct tape from the sole, exposing a raggedly chiseled compartment. 

_Zaros bless the former colonies._ Too delighted to be annoyed, he caught the message that’d been stuffed inside before it could hit the ground. 

“Nice meeting you. But, to reiterate.” Glass and plaster crunched in a uniped staccato as they knelt down to avail themself of the sheriff’s left slip-on. “I am no longer available for parties.”

“A pleasure,” Sliske breathed. It required every last ounce of his strained patience to read the writing on the paper without shredding it. “I’ll make sure he has your letter out by the weekend. Good luck on the dig.”

* * *

They’d been at it a while.

It would’ve gone more smoothly, if Sliske had just taken a moment from running and thinking to ask why. Why the chase. Why the photograph.

Sliske was beating off death and boredom with a stick in sunny São Paulo when the house's patrón brought an envelope down the stairs. Enakhra’s toxin had rendered him basically useless and his usual supplier wasn’t returning his phone calls, so the mildewy subbasement of an electro-pop club was where he’d staged his recovery. No god nor mortal man could’ve rooted him out.

But where others failed, Azzanadra tended to prosper.

His back was to the camera. Sliske noticed that first because he’d never seen him undressed from behind, or still, or for so long. He was standing knee-deep in a pool of water ringed with high boulders. The only garment to interrupt the unblemished tapestry of his skin was a white fundoshi.

Azzanadra as though made serene, forever. Bizarrely out of place and perfect. The bamboo cutter sneaking a bath out of the family home, possessed by some wayward yōkai. Every line of his body looked as though it'd been carved from storm clouds, the dark curves of his thighs reflecting leaf-dappled shafts of sunlight, like if Sliske were there he'd feel how warm they were, like he could just reach through the dye and touch him.

He was so beautiful it ached. And with nothing more than a polaroid, a picture the size of his palm, Azzanadra had wounded him irreparably with that beauty.

Feverish, Sliske had stared at him until the shape of the world beyond his mind no longer had form or meaning. He’d undone his gown, fumbling for some receptacle — a forgotten washrag he wouldn’t be arsed to replace — and with about five and a half strokes burst into it. 

Though flattered to have received something so overtly playful, and from _Azzanadra_ , of all culprits, he’d still set his brain steaming analyzing its purpose.

If it was a calling card in disguise, what was he saying? _I’m here?_ Or _don’t forget me?_ He obviously hadn’t, and it might’ve taken time, if he’d already moved, but Sliske was an accomplished tracker, too. Maybe it was just an incredibly gauche _get well soon_? 

Before he knew it the fixation had boiled over into hatred, and Sliske had shoved it back into the envelope’s jacket without another thought. Some discreet invisible realm where it couldn’t hurt him unless he wanted it to.

He wasn’t afraid. Azzanadra didn’t _frighten_ him. They were both wanted by the Black Knight — and not in the fun way. He was arguably better equipped to do Sliske harm from a distance, although that arrangement did entail foisting his labor off on lovesick flunkies. To his knowledge, Azzanadra wouldn’t leave murdering him to middle management. And Sliske knew exactly how he wanted to watch Azzanadra die. 

The reply was as spontaneous as it was tasteless. Something he’d swiped from a newsstand by the queue at the closest farmácia: _Brazil Awaits You,_ the bulk of the text superimposed over a vintage painting of topless women raising cocktails. 

Consequently, Sliske had filled out the entire back side of it with whatever had sprung to mind in-between gulps of Dorflex — mainly discursive, unsubtle suggestions that the coward come out of hiding and fuck him. While the disposable camera he’d pinched had been used up by almost half somehow, he’d tried to make the rest count by taking far too many shots of his chest and mouth. Both went into a bubble mailer made out to the Japanese PO box listed as the polaroid's return address, and that was entrusted with the bouncer upstairs, along with a bribe, to drop it off wherever the post went. 

Not a day later Sliske's body made the cruel choice to feel better. Healthy enough to skip town and freshly vulnerable in the light of sobriety, it was clearer that the club had been compromised.

If Azzanadra had accepted his invitation, he didn’t let on about it through the letters or messengers that followed.

The only indication he ever gave that their correspondence was designed to be reciprocal were the pens he left behind in his caches, and people like Glitter, who seemed to be puzzles themselves.

* * *

Glitter's note led him all the way over the border, to Jalisco. Sliske bought a t-shirt from the regional museum’s gift shop while he waited for night to fall in Zapopan. Then he went to retrieve the second half of their message. 

It was in the custody of an old lesbian named Ricky. He was waiting for him on a bench in a deserted market square, his fingers tapping out a mysterious rhythm across the knee of black, pleated slacks. 

Sliske sat down. Wordlessly, their eyes met, and Ricky handed him a single sheet of A4. 

_It’s time we ended this,_ it read, so dizzyingly succinct he almost dropped it. _Mine or yours?_

“Pen,” Sliske said, grasping around the motions of holding one with his free hand. Ricky laughed and slapped a Bic into it. He used the bench seat to write on, circling his answer hard enough the paper dented, and then handed both back. 

“Hm.” Ricky’s mouth pursed around a skeptical frown. “You sure about that?”

Sliske gawked at him. “What do you mean? Is that a bad choice?”

“Could be,” he said defensively, tucking the paper away before he had the chance to consider changing his answer. “But that’s just my opinion.” From the same pocket, he pulled out some glossy, perforated paper and split it into halves, gesturing that Sliske take. 

They were plane tickets. “I don’t need this.”

“I do.” Ricky popped his eyebrows at him. “This is a good airline. I would’ve preferred Morocco, but my doctor says I need the vacation either way.” He offered a starched shirt sleeve and grinned solicitously. “You’re gonna make an intimidating pillow.” 

Dazed, Sliske allowed himself to be led toward a brown Camaro parked around the corner. “Nothing of the sort.”

Protection wasn’t the usual burden of his remit. He had, of course, escaped assassins at an aeroport before — Manila, 1951; Atlanta, 2011 — and he didn’t mind accomplishing such feats for other people, per se. This would be the first time he’d been called upon to play escort and shield for the duration of a twelve hour flight.

It was terribly uneventful. His charge did fall asleep on him, though Sliske disguised himself suitably enough that his child-size overnight bag fit in the hollows of their bodies nicely, and in the most literal sense, the woman weighed nothing.

When they parted at customs in Cardiff, Ricky to declare his cigarettes and Sliske ostensibly to use the little geneth’s room, it was in a self-congratulatory mood. Sliske gave him his best wishes of relaxation. 

Ricky just smiled.

“Keep him busy,” he said. “I’m trying to see more than one castle.”


	2. Chapter 2

Dr Nabanik lived in Aberystwyth, because he was a lie. A Celt of that name did exist, once, but had been dead for several decades.

Azzanadra lived a few kilometers outside Coed Felinrhyd, because though the man styled himself the classic embodiment of the Mahjarrat, like some restrictively bred horse, or canine, uniquely pure among the genetically dilute, at heart he was an elf. And twice as elusive. 

Sliske entered the forest on foot. He didn’t know what it was like to be so successfully comfortable with one’s own thoughts that they were willing or even eager to spend the majority of their time alone with them, but the woods were as quiet as they were mossy, and for a short moment of his life, the walk out to the cottage took on a meditative hue.

It _had_ taken time. Even the most perceptive of them only felt each other up to a certain distance, and the Earth was large, but the rote, mortal business of lecturing that’d kept Azzanadra's secret so well had ultimately been the hint to expose him. 

Putting to the side all suggestions of doubt, Sliske had known of this hideaway, or at least its general location, for about six months. How long Azzanadra had waited for him to find it, he hadn’t the faintest. Privately, he acknowledged that the shameful likelihood Azzanadra had gotten impatient enough to tip Sliske off on purpose was the main reason why he’d yet to pay him a visit. Not the fact on its own. But what an embarrassment it was, to be aware of that.

It created an attractive excuse. Sliske could’ve left when he arrived. By the time he reached the cottage’s glade, his introspections were limited and petty.

Humidity was the enemy of civil behavior and he was unforgivably damp. Green fur coated every towering arbor, rock, hill, and log, jealously hoarding its moisture right until he so much as looked at it. Sheer force of will prevented him from snarling each time deep wells of water rushed from the earth to fill the indentations of his steps.

A break in the treeline revealed that the front yard — though picturesque with its crisp mountain views — was just a collection of finger-grass pathways and more puddles. Sliske treated these otherwise harmless obstacles like they were hot coals, picking across with speed.

Agonized, he squelched up the stairs to the porch, and rather desperate to be dry, he violently toed off his shoes. In one last jag of horrified disgust he bent down and whipped them at the nearest wall. 

_If_ there _was_ an appropriate answer to sending his pair of waterlogged trainers banging the length of the porch to where it began wrapping around the cottage, it wasn’t forthcoming. Silence was his welcome. Alder flowers had fallen along the rail and looked very much like sleeping yellow caterpillars. 

He was alone. 

If he left, just grabbed his shoes and vanished, Azzanadra wouldn’t even know he’d come. Or thrown things at his house.

With a long, intentional breath, Sliske unclenched. He left his shoes to a long curing by the front door and made for the back, peering through the surrounding foliage with his eyes and reaching into it with his mind. 

He circled the exterior before he felt confident no one was inside. Certain it would be more trouble than it was worth to literally cover any tracks from breaking in, and with nowhere else to go, he returned to the patio, lingering at the windows as he went. Shadows of the afternoon sun created pockets of visible space in the dark. A small but complete kitchenette. Metal bookcases. A leather sling full of firewood.

Azzanadra appeared an hour later, in no apparent hurry. The hillside behind the cottage flourished with saplings, and he wove his way between them, no worse for wear in a thin rain-slick and hiking boots. Sliske watched him walk all the way down without saying a word. 

He was larger than he remembered. Fuller in the shoulders, thicker in the limbs. Maybe more beneath the coat. An implausibility for people their age, that sharply deprived cut to his cheeks had filled out some, which meant he’d begun to favor it. 

When he came to a stop at the edge of the patio, just abreast of taller, it was Azzanadra’s turn to take his slow, individual measure of him. 

Suddenly, his earlier impulse to run returned, transmuted. It’d become a warning, the dawning realization that they were both actually there. That Azzanadra was also cutting away the changed bits and pieces of him to restore whatever fit memory better. That doubt might be challenging either of them.

Sliske had resolved to see this through, but he wasn’t the only one with a mercurial streak. Azzanadra could decide he didn’t like what he saw, take off, and then it would all be up in the air, an indefinite stretch of years passing before they saw each other again.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Azzanadra saturated him in another critical look before coming to some sort of conclusion. “I suppose,” he said, artlessly brushing by.

When Sliske turned to follow, Azzanadra pivoted and placed a firm, denying hand on his chest. “You’re filthy.”

“You were aware of that when you invited me,” Sliske argued, trying not to push into or away from it.

“I’m getting you a towel first,” Azzanadra said with finality, hand falling, and vanished through the back door.

His passage was eventually permitted. Azzanadra’s rain-slick dripped from a hook in the entryway. The hiking boots had disappeared into a low chest. All the tacks of life in the wilderness that held together the image of a home that’d never so much as seen mud.

Deemed clean and acceptably dry, Sliske dropped into an overstuffed couch with a groan, adding himself to the collection. 

It was a mild surprise when Azzanadra visited his living area from Lord knew where to flick a light on, its whitish glow a diffuse halo behind a glass turtle.

“I’ve solar panels on the roof,” he said, feeding a few wisps of kindling into a wood stove. “There’s another lamp in the bedroom. To read by, and such.”

He _was_ more beneath the coat. He’d increased quite a bit, filling his clothing like a second skin, as though he’d had anything so casual as a white Henley and dark pair of sweats tailored. Suggestions of the new bulk rounded his arse and thighs when Azzanadra bent and strained the fabric at his elbows as he meddled with the fire. 

“Oh, just to read,” Sliske scorned, stalking him with his eyes. Azzanadra withdrew behind a wall that must’ve divided the kitchenette from the rest of the cottage. “Nothing too salaciously secular, I hope.”

It was a _titanic shock_ when Azzanadra laughed. He’d barely regained his composure by the time he returned, offering him a coffee. Its warmth scoured the discomfort from his joints, and the taste was bland, but reviving, steaming in his face.

The drink was what finally caught him up to the greater pattern in these detached acts of hospitality. Azzanadra took his seat beside him to flip open another chest, its contents a muddle of fabrics. Sliske tried to protest. The quilt only recognized the demands of gravity. It settled over their laps, heavy and protective. 

“They could hear your teeth chattering in Bristol,” he explained.

Sliske set his coffee on the nearest reliable surface — a squareish sculpture Nabanik would readily have a point of origin for — and kissed him.

Azzanadra pulled away first, and that wasn’t going to work. Sliske pursued. His knee rose to brace the couch with his thigh; Azzanadra made a noise, but allowed it. Allowed his head to be ground gently into the backrest, the noise less of a protest and more like the beginning of a conversation. 

“I have—” 

Sliske sucked on the fat ridge of his bottom lip. Azzanadra jerked against him with some of his new, blissfully solid weight. Hands that radiated heat groped and pulled his arse closer. 

“—a bed.”

“Cheers,” he dismissed, obligingly invasive. He managed to get those gorgeous thighs around one of his slimmer ones and pushed, maneuvering him supine and tugging the quilt over their shoulders. 

Azzanadra freed himself from Sliske’s mouth. “This couch isn’t big enough for sex.” 

“Who said anything about sex?” Sliske said with unfiltered sarcasm, struggling to undress him from the middle. He worked the waist of his sweats lower, exposing the large flares of his hips, and discovered a little more in the process — sheer whorls of lace, their midnight color disappearing into his dark skin. 

He ran a fingertip under the band. They were snug, but not restrictive. “You went _hiking_ in this?” Azzanadra snorted, loud beside the quiet and the fire. A thought occurred to him. Sliske rucked up his Henley to the armpits and stared. 

It was the same color, wrapping his chest to create a plunging décolletage, its material painting lush gardenscapes of flat textures and razor-thin silk across the valley of his pectorals. Fingers dug in where they still dithered at his shirt and collar, eliciting a pained exhale. Sliske looked down at him in earnest.

“You. You’re seducing me,” he accused, achingly hard between the thick, encompassing crush of Azzanadra's inner thighs. “This is a seduction.”

Azzanadra feigned astonishment. “No.”

Sliske almost swallowed his own tongue. Unsteady hands moved to brush their thumbs across the black rings of his nipples, soft from under the bralette’s slippery-smooth material. He leaned in critically. “You thought you _needed_ to seduce me?”

It was half a gasp. “I didn’t think I needed to do anything.” He squeezed his legs together and for an instant Sliske saw static. “I wanted to.”

" _You._ " If possible, the following kiss was less polite than the one prior. "I've _killed_ for you.” Azzanadra didn’t even seem particularly contrite about that, which earned him a kiss so filthy he bucked up against him, leveraging his position to arch away from where he’d been backed into the couch’s arm.

Sliske gave nothing. “You sent me to jail for _sex,_ ” he growled, licking into his mouth. “I almost drowned. For sex—I almost drowned at the bottom of the Ganges, just to—I stole a Raphael, I stole— _forty fucking cakes_ for you, you greedy, selfish—”

The quilt finally slipped to the floor in a cool rush. “Sliske,” Azzanadra choked, but his hands were already answering him, delicately raking around the barrel of his chest, looking for clasps and finding none. He settled for stripping him of his sweats, batting his hands down when Azzanadra tried to reciprocate by pulling at his shirt. 

“Please. I can’t look at this any longer,” he begged, eyes the quality of black magic. “Where did you get it? Why did you even get it?”

Sliske undid the jeans he’d nicked off some nosy patriot in a Silverado not much less than a day ago. “It’s Lent, and a museum. I thought you liked those.”

In his opinion the fit was rather impressive, but Azzanadra regarded Our Lady of Expectation’s printed red and blue figure as one would something unsanitary, forcing it over his head and chucking it ambitiously near the stove. “You’re thinner than I remember.”

An intense urge to puff and flex rolled through him. Sliske ignored it, using his knees to coax his thighs apart. “I haven’t been eating very well.” 

Ever the conquistador, Azzanadra planted a foot on the floor and gripped the backrest with one of his arms, settling in to watch. Probably drawing comparisons between reality and what he’d manufactured in his mind, alone in his quaint, Welsh cottage, dreaming of the day. 

_I wanted to._ The idea hurt, being toyed with when they could’ve been doing this for years instead. Sliske wanted to demonstrate how much — throw him to the floor and taunt him with his size, push their talk in the wrong directions, thrust the malicious side of too hard.

But he was wearing _silk intimates._ He was lovely in them, the sort of lovely one kept in boxes and frames. His tongue tasted like Liberica blend and the fraught loneliness of their kind, and it wasn’t truly his fault that Sliske had burned so quietly for him.

He mouthed Azzanadra through the fabric, already clinging and damp around his slit. Forearms caging him flush with the couch cushions, Sliske sucked him dripping wet, stretching the designs in the weave until he was sure he’d ruined them. He only paused to ask a question, rubbing spit-slickened lips to the top, across the modest jut of his cock. “Do you still come from this?”

Azzanadra’s head lolled; his neck had given out at some point, gaze rolling to consult him, really sussing it out for some reason when his gut answer would’ve done.

“It’s good, Sliske.” As if proclaiming neglect, the rounded nerve cluster jumped infinitesimally. He massaged it with harder curls of his tongue, waiting, and Azzanadra made a weak sound. “I don’t want to stop.”

Sliske tightened his arms around the swell of his abdomen. “Ask me to take these off and I’ll finish you.”

Azzanadra made the same sound, louder. “No, you don't ha—”

“I’ll make you come in them, Azzanadra, but I won't enjoy it,” he provoked. "Come in me. I want you to.”

His jaw worked around a stolen breath of a reply. When his hips arched, Sliske let him go, let him peel away the soaked nylon and bare himself, and then he sealed his mouth around his cock and sucked. 

It was obviously too much. Just knowing that felt incredible. Sliske almost had to wrestle him to make him stay, twisting his hips and panting like an exhausted dog, the muscles in his calf turning to iron under his fingers a half-second before Azzanadra shouted, spine locking in place while the rest of his body melted into a shuddering mess.

For one wild moment Sliske thought about joining him — biting the exposed curve of his arse and spending untouched, emotionally fucked, physically overstimulated — but ultimately conceded to crawling over him and collapsing into an untidy kiss.

At some point Azzanadra pulled the quilt back over them, and they dozed in a position that was an even split between perfect and disastrously uncomfortable. Night came on demure, nothing louder than a bit of sap popping in the fire willing to intrude.

Eventually, he had to move, any excuses of basking in the glow of love recently made rapidly thinning the less recently it became.

“Where are you going,” Azzanadra muttered, holding fast. 

Sliske stilled mid press-up, blinking at him. “My coffee," he said belatedly. "Do you have a microwave?”

Azzanadra snorted and let go. “Don’t be an idiot. I’ll make you another one.”

* * *

He’d been wrong about the cottage being empty. 

“She’s only a mouser,” Azzanadra corrected him, openly wary of how quickly they’d warmed to each other. “Don’t do that. I don’t want her expecting it.”

Sliske finished stroking the cat behind her ears. “You’ve a cruel master,” he whispered. Returned to sipping coffee, letting her paws try to trap his hand as it straightened and tilted photo paper. 

Azzanadra raised a finger and put its claw-point down on a slightly blurred image of a woman crossing an aisle filled with sodas and snack foods. The view of her bottom half was interrupted by an enclosure of balls in various bright colors. It’d been taken at about her wrist height — either a teenager, or a very tall child. 

“Now, the dress was the obvious subject, but I did, eventually, figure that the bottom row of salsa prices, pulled from binary, spelled out ‘good enough to eat’ in Portuguese,” he went on to say. “And that was transparently foul of you, so I ignored it. But then when I realized it connected to the photograph of the _cashier_ —”

 _Cryptography._ Sliske hid the majority of a smile behind his mug. “Oh, you can’t have missed the magazines.”

“As I was saying,” Azzanadra declared, his confidence advancing with the jab at his reasoning. “You gave everything away. I had to improve on the game.”


End file.
